


Yasha never forgot Molly's face

by Helpnotwanted



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drabble, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, No real plot to speak of, This Is Sad, Why do I do this to myself, post-episode 27
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-07 23:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20825849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helpnotwanted/pseuds/Helpnotwanted
Summary: Like the petals of a flower pressed between the pages of her book.





	Yasha never forgot Molly's face

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this sometime during the Uk'otoa arc, when we were all freshly sad and emo. I'm still not over it, tbh. Molly will always be a really singular character, probably one of the most important to me personally, ever. Long may he reign, for those unforgotten never die.

Yasha never forgot Molly’s face. 

She kept his smile, sincere, and his smirk, insolent, and the glint of golden baubles in pale winter light, and the easy, free affection of his eyes. Purples and reds in deep vibrant hues, a bit faded, but still colourful, like the petals of a flower pressed between the pages of her book. A collection of features that somehow held meaning, etched deep, deep, in the place where she could still feel Zuala’s smile despite the seasons, despite the distance, despite the gaps in her memory. In that place, they still smiled. All the joy she had ever known in the world, locked away, pristine. 

She’d never really intended to stick around the ragtag band of misfits she and Molly had defaulted to once the circus was good and gone. They'd been, after all, his companions more than hers. She'd never needed them the way he did, the same way he’d needed their once-family of ill-assembled carnival oddities: all jagged edges and cautious coexistence, guarded pasts and no future to speak of. Unlike him, she had known life outside the circus. Knew how to be alone. And when she needed to, she knew she left him where she could always find him, eventually, where he was happy and on the move. Surrounded. 

Now that he was gone, well. 

She figured, in the strange haze that descended after the chains were broken and the darkness lifted — and the sick, trapped feeling never left the space just under her skin — somehow, she figured that she’d wander after thunderstorms for however long He called her, however long she was needed, the broken champion of a forbidden god who still saw meaning and use to her existence. Until the time when she would serve her purpose and then. Fade. 

But, of course, she’d been wrong. She found them — or they found her, she’s not entirely too sure — where she was not looking, halfway across the continent, in the suspended moment between the blinding glare of sun and sea and the opaque shadows of some seedy dockside tavern. Her Stormlord was neither a trickster nor a riddle-prone god, yet he had led her there, right back to where she started, like a kind of frustrating puzzle or test meant to show her some truth she'd known all along. It was rather peeving. 

Still, as always, she went where she was sent. She stayed where he was still present, painfully so. Not like the smiling, glittering picture of him she kept for herself, but like a festering black hole that no one dared to touch. 

She saw Beau shuffle a joltingly familiar deck of cards, once, very late, when the other woman probably thought herself alone. The world had lurched a little then, before the feeling was quickly followed by a sort of empty, shallow pity. Without Molly, the cards were all but useless. Incomplete, as well — Jester had plucked the Moon from the deck and laid it atop his grave to weather alone the wind and snow. If there had been magic there once before, there was none to be found now. Just frozen images and gilded, gaudy frames, sorrow and decay, whatever lies or truths they once might have told now lost, along with the one who'd given them meaning. Beauregard had never much cared for Molly's fortune-telling, in any case. Sleight of hand and superstition, preying on the hopes and fears of those who were fool enough to give their coin. And, perhaps, Molly had been a fraud and a charlatan, to some degree — he certainly had never shirked the accusation. His was a realm of half-shadow and mischief, of veiled moon-patron deities and strange whispered truths not meant to be decoded, but felt. Yet for all of her scorn during the time she'd spent at his side, Beau guarded that deck like a jealous dragon hiding its hoard, and studied it, with a singular intensity she reserved for little else, as though bent on reading a language she had never learnt to speak.

Jester would mention his name in the most random of ways, causing the rest to tense up, mouths thin, for the smallest of seconds before carrying on with eyes darker than before. They'd do so gingerly, and Jester would watch and catalog each and every reaction with wide, observant eyes, as though every "Molly" uttered aloud was a question she wasn't sure how else to ask. Yasha wanted to answer it for her. Wanted to tell her his name was not a dark cloud over her head, a weight to carry along like guilt and the still-lingering fear and despair of the dungeons underneath the Sour Nest. But it was not really her permission to give. 

Fjord said nothing at all, did nothing, except perhaps throw himself to the literal serpents by tracking down chained gods, infiltrating jungle temples, bedding then betraying pirate queens and getting himself — and the rest of them — put on trial in a city of thieves. Molly would have loved every second of it.

Nott, surprisingly, held onto him in a way Yasha knew he would probably would have most wanted: like family. Where Caleb remained ever so skittish and withdrawn, Nott had calmed much — insofar as her gripping fear of water, of which they were surrounded by as well as rather often very much submerged in, would allow. A matronly, fierce, protective streak once reserved for Caleb only she now doled out unreservedly for all of them. A determination to keep them stronger, together, almost obvious in the way her voice would turn from wavering and cracked to iron-willed in its certainty. In her willingness to descend to the ocean floor, her very own phobic nightmare, because Jester felt safer with her there, because Fjord needed them to make this journey and not get lost.

Caleb, well. Caleb was dour and shifty as always, alternating between his now oddly cemented partnership of trust with Beau, and the twitchy nervousness with which he seemed to constantly be looking over his shoulder even when he was staring unblinking at the grimy woodgrain of some seedy tavern. Making blood-pacts with Fjord to unlock ancient, undocumented, sacrificial rituals at the bottom of the ocean, in an evil creature's lair, just to satisfy their rather misplaced curiosity — and then nearly crawling out of his own skin after one decidedly civil conversation with a fellow mage in a rather more safely urban setting. Still looking to Nott like a person starved for affection after the world was wiped clean of everyone else. Somehow, Caleb carried more guilt and anxiety than Yasha could ever fathom was possible for a single creature, and it seemed as though Molly had become yet another body he stored in his closet, another tragedy he kept under tight wraps, another nightmare bleeding into who knew how many others. He looked at all of them like that, sometimes — like he wasn't seeing them, now, but rather seeing something from a very long time ago, or something meant to occur, sooner or later, terrible and inescapable. He looked at them all like he'd buried them already, buried them with Molly in that cold and lonely grave at the end of a cold and empty road to nowhere.

But Yasha kept him as she'd known him, alive, vibrant, contrary and unashamed. Molly had chosen these people, she knew, or had decided somewhere along the way that he had chosen them, rather than been thrown at them by whimsy and circumstance. He'd chosen them like he'd chosen her, like he had chosen each and every person that had walked beside him over the course of his spectacularly short life. Chose them despite their secrets and their idiosyncrasies, or, perhaps, because of them. Molly had always loved broken people, in the way that only broken people could. He didn't so much try to repair them, though, as simply hold them together. Their broken limbs, although healer he was not. Their scattered thoughts, a kiss to the head following the crack of a slap to break whatever spell — literal or figurative — held them frozen in the middle of the fray. Their often rocky partnership, though he claimed it was he who needed them, who needed "this", whatever it was, to work. He said it loud and clear, he told them in so many words what the rest were always so hesitant to say out loud. Because he could. 

And Yasha, well. She'd never needed them the way he had. The way she'd needed him. Everything that she'd ever held dear had been torn from her violently, time and again, but she supposed that if it was for him, then. If the Stormlord wanted her there, if he guided her way. Maybe she could try to help keep them alive.


End file.
